Engineering Services
So what is the Engineering Services team and what do they do?  The Engineering Services team helps clients solve business problems through advanced implementation add-ons.  This team of highly specialized, senior engineers is available on a short-term, paid basis to extend your SiteCatalyst implementation through the creation of custom solutions or integrations with your company’s other IT systems.  The following will cover just a few examples of the types of projects with which the Engineering Services team can assist you.

VISTA Rules
As I covered in a previous post, VISTA and DB VISTA rules can be created to enhance your data collection.  All VISTA rules are custom projects created by the Engineering Services team.  They have created thousands of custom VISTA projects over the years and continue to create new ones every day.

Report Suite Add-ons
The Engineering Services team has seen many cases where clients want to push their SiteCatalyst implementation as far as possible, but don’t have the internal resources to do so.  Here are some examples of the types of report suite add-ons that the Engineering Services team can provide:

• Want to incorporate Cost of Goods Sold to your SiteCatalyst reporting (as shown in this post)?
• Ever wish you could see more GeSegmentation data (country, region, etc…) in Conversion reports?
• Want to get more detail on Daily, Weekly and Monthly Return Frequency?
• Want to go deeper on Time Spent per Page, Campaign Tracking Code, Internal Search term?
• Want to see advanced techniques to value your site pages?
• Want to see how your campaigns are performing across visits, without having to touch your implementation?
• How about tracking the bounce rate of referrers?
• Want to see paid and natural search engine/keyword data in the same report as your campaigns?  What about also adding referring domains?  Want to see a report like the one below?

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Report Suite Routing
Using Engineering Services, you can easily send website traffic to different report suites without having to make a single change to the code on your pages.  Here are some examples of ways Engineering Services helps clients re-route data:

• Do spiders/bots ever visit your site?  Do you use monitoring agents like Gomez or Keynote to measure up time for your site?  Engineering Services can remove the noise by routing this traffic to another report suite.
• Do you have safeguards in place to keep fraudulent orders from skewing your data?  Engineering Services can keep your SiteCatalyst data/reports clean by automatically moving suspicious behavior to a separate report suite based on criteria you provide.
• Are your employees’ visits to your site tainting your data?  Engineering Services can route that traffic to a separate report suite so you can focus on true customer behavior.

Encryption Solutions
As more and more data is collected online, many customers want to employ data encryption to ensure that key company data is safe.  The following are some advanced data encryption solutions created by Engineering Services:

• Engineering Services can encrypt any data being sent to Omniture and decrypt it after it is received so it is inserted into SiteCatalyst data tables correctly.
• If your organization receives data feeds, DataWarehouse reports from Omniture or has to send SAINT files or DB VISTA data, Engineering Services can encrypt these file to ensure a high standard of security.

Misc. Custom Projects
The Engineering Services team thrives on tackling the seemingly impossible and has completed many other types of solutions to prove it:

• Bringing historical web analytics or log file data into SiteCatalyst.
• Using advanced techniques of visitor segmentation to apply segments to historical data.
• Advanced CRM and other 3^rd party integrations.
• Custom Data Feeds to populate your back-end systems with website data.
• Re-inserting data that may have been missed due to tagging errors or oversight.
• Advanced usage of Omniture API’s.

New Solutions
I am always impressed by how many new solutions they create. For example, I did not even know about a new Custom Desktop Widget until I started writing this post.  Take a look at a couple of screen shots they sent me.

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These secure custom widgets can display standard SiteCatalyst or custom reports, and provide real-time data to people across an organization without requiring direct access to SiteCatalyst.

As mentioned above, these are just a few of the ways that the Engineering Services team can assist you.  If you have not asked Engineering Services you have not heard the final answer.  If you have ever run into something that you feel you cannot do “out-of-the-box” please call your Account Manager, who can arrange for a consultation with someone in Engineering Services.  I promise it will be worth your while!

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

Over the past 12-18 months, video has quickly become one of the fastest growing and effective forms of rich media on the internet.  And just like all other online marketing opportunities, it should be monitored and optimized to maximize your return on investment.  In this post, we’ll provide insight not only into the importance of online videos but also how Omniture can help you extract maximum ROI.

Why Online Video Reporting?
Why is online video so important to your online business?  For content providers, such as media companies, video provides a lucrative monetization stream as well as a rich engaging tool for visitors.   Pre-roll advertisements, for example, command higher CPM’s than their static content counterparts.   Knowing how much video is consumed, what the optimum video length for your audience is, and which parts of your video are most watched allow you to optimize your ad sell space.

Retailers use video for product review or demonstration purposes, with the hope that customers who view videos will become more likely to purchase a product or service.  Service providers can use video to reduce support costs by providing an informative, highly engaging self service support tool.  The same can be said for any number of online businesses with goals including lead generation, micro-conversions, and brand awareness. Knowing which of your videos lead to the most online conversions can allow you to effectively allocate money and resources creating them.

Clearly video can be an important part of your online strategy, and Omniture can help you make the most of it. Though not an exhaustive list, here are a few critical questions that Omniture SiteCatalyst can help you answer:

Most Popular Videos/Video Categories
What are my most popular videos or categories?  The report below tells you at a glance which videos are your most popular for the specified time period.  You can also see that average view time and how many users watch 70-100% of your video (the reporting percentage displayed can easily be configured).  If you notice that a video is very popular but has a poor completion rate, then that video may need to be shortened or the video title may not match your user’s expectation what the video should be.

In addition to video views, other metrics like video visits tell you how many overall visits to the site included at least one video view. And like most other Site Catalyst Variables, you can classify on the video title so that you can report these metrics by relevant categories like topic, video creator, publish date etc.

Optimal Video Length
Are my videos the optimal length for my audience?  Continuing the example above, let’s say that you notice a popular video has a particularly low completion rate.  To determine why, you could pull a video segments viewed report to see where the drop off occurs.  In the report below, it looks like more than half of the audience drops off within first 30 seconds of the video.  Past the 30 second mark the remaining audience tends to stay to the end. What is it about the first 30 seconds of our video that could be contributing to this drop off? Are all the points of interest in the first 30 seconds of the video?  Perhaps there’s a technical issue that makes the video jerky or load slowly.  Is there a critical mid-roll commercial that contributes to abandonment?  These are all questions that we can investigate further for our key videos.

Video Contribution
Do my videos contribute in a positive way to my site success?  The report below shows which videos were viewed in the same visit as a purchase.  Site Catalyst allows you to attribute revenue anywhere from the last video viewed or up to the last 10 videos viewed before the purchase.

Viral Video Tracking
If I have videos that I put out on popular video sharing sites such as YouTube, Viddler, and Yahoo! Video, can I know how widely they are being viewed in an easy fashion?   SiteCatalyst can help here as well.  Omniture has just announced an exclusive new feature that is now available as a beta to the general Omniture customer base.  This new tool that allows you to monitor your videos across all the popular video sharing sites and, in one report, see the total number of views. You can also create custom video lists that you want to track.  If you are interested in joining this Beta program, please contact your Omniture Account Manager or Consultant for more details.

Getting Started
So how do you get started?  The answer to this depends on your media player and how custom you need your implementation to be.  Omniture code can be used to track any Quicktime, Windows Media, or Real Player videos.  Plus SiteCatalyst can be used to track flash based video players, including any third-party vendors (such as BrightCove and Maven) that allow their customers to add custom code their players.

To get started, log into Site Catalyst then go to Supporting Docs>> Manuals.  The first entry under the Implementation Guide column is the Media Tracking and Action Source manual.  This is a manual that will give you direction on tracking videos, using both JavaScript and Flash, in addition to tracking flash applications in general.   You can also search the knowledge base for any white papers that may be helpful.  See the Media Tracking manual for more details on what kind of effort would be involved for your particular player.

How custom does your video implementation need to be?   If you only need to see video data within the video reports of SiteCatalyst, then a basic implementation should be enough for you.  However, if you want to see more granular video data or that data in relation to your other custom eVars, props, and events, then a little more customization should be done.  You can learn more from the implementation guide.

Finally, how much will this cost?  Video tracking is based on the number of server calls being sent to Omniture.  There is no cost to enable the video reports in your report suite or to obtain the code from your Account Manager or Consultant.  The only incremental cost is the additional number of server calls sent during video play.  As part of the out-of-the-box tracking option, a server call is sent at video begin and end (2 server calls per complete video watched).  To get more granular viewing information, we recommend that you send update server calls throughout video play.  You can send as few or as many as you like.  The more frequent the updates, the more detailed that data and vice versa.  Omniture code allows you to send updates at custom percentage complete milestones (such as 25%, 50%, or 75%) or for number of seconds watched (every 30 seconds, for example).  So the number of server calls sent in per video is completely dependent on the cost benefit of additional server calls per video view.  Other factors such as video length, video content, and your audience will help determine the right number of server calls per video for your site.

As always, you can engage with an Omniture Consultant for more advanced help and to discuss options related to pros/cons of more granular video tracking.

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

Therefore, I thought I would answer this question here in case any of you out there are in a similar situation and offer website content in multiple languages.

Se Habla Español?  Parle Italiano?
As we move to a global marketplace, providing content in multiple languages is becoming more and more common.  However, adding foreign language capabilities to your website can be a difficult, time-consuming effort.  Hence, over time, you might want to use SiteCatalyst to see if these efforts are paying off or if adding this functionality is contributing to the bottom line.  The following will show how I have dealt with this in the past.

Pagenames and Pathing
The first item in this area I tackle is the Pagename variable since it is so important and drives page-level pathing.  Obviously, the first question here is whether you should have a different page name for each page in each language.  While I can see reasons for doing this, I am a strong believer that you should have only one pagename for each page - regardless of which language it is in.  This allows you to see the true pathing of pages irrespective of language.  Another reason I advocate this is based upon the simple fact that you may have 20,000 pages on your site and if you translate them all into 10 languages you will now have 200,000 pages to deal with in your pages and pathing reports!

However, I concede that there may be cases where you want to see how visitors looking at pages in Spanish differ from those looking at pages in Chinese.  The easiest way to do this is to use Omniture Discover where you can easily segment on a language variable (see below) and then view the pathing reports differently for each language (or even combine a bunch of languages together!).  But if you are not fortunate enough to have Omniture Discover, there is still a way to see pathing differences by language.  To do this, simply concatenate the language and the pagename (i.e. spanish:home page) and place that value into a new custom Traffic Variable (sProp) and enable pathing.  Doing this will allow you to find any page in any language and then view pathing behavior taking place before/after that page as shown here:

Success Events by Language
The next question I get from customers is to show them which of their website Success Events take place in each language.  For example, of all lead forms that are filled out, how many were submitted by a user using the Spanish language pages.  While you can derive this information by looking at various page reports as described above, the easiest way to do this is through the conversion area.  On each page, simply set a custom Conversion Variable (eVar) with the value indicating in which language that page is being viewed.  By having this value in an eVar, you can the open up that eVar report and add any Success Event metric you wish and see the percentages associated with each language as shown here:

Pages by Language
There are two other “traffic” related items that I like to show clients related to languages.  The first is which pages are most often viewed in multiple languages.  To do this, I pass the language the page is being shown in to a Traffic Variable (at the same time it is passed to the eVar mentioned above) and then create a Traffic Data Correlation between it and the Pagename variable.  Once you have done this, you can use the correlation to find any page on your site and then break it down by language to see how often it is viewed in each foreign language as shown here:

Also, since correlations go both ways, you can easily open the Language sProp report, find the “Spanish” row and see what pages are most often viewed in Spanish for your entire site.

The final thing you can review is how many pageviews and/or visits involve foreign languages.  Using the same sProp describes above, you can open up the sProp report and use Pageviews or Visits (if enabled) as metrics to see the overall usage of each language as shown here:

Any other cool things you have done to answer questions related to foreign languages?  If so, please comment here…

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

What is Success Event Pathing?
As described in the Success Event post, Omniture customers set SiteCatalyst Success Events when visitors perform an action on a website (or within a widget).  We use these Success Events to measure how well our online property is performing against predefined business goals.  However, for those who are designers or information architects of an online property, sometimes we are less concerned with how often something happens as we are in when it happens.  For example, if the goal of our website is to get visitors to view videos and read blogs, in hopes that they will submit a lead generation form, it would be interesting to understand the order in which visitors perform these actions.  The order these events take place may impact the way we design navigation or think about the various levels of the website.  We may have questions such as:

1. What is the first Success Event visitors tend to take?
2. What is the most common order that all visitors perform our website Success Events?
3. What is the success event most often performed directly before our primary “money” Success Event?

Below is an example that will show you what Success Event Pathing looks like when implemented.  Let’s imagine that you have Success Events for Blog Post Views, Video Views, Product Views, Newsletter Sign-ups and Lead Generation Form Submissions.  Once implemented, you would like to see pathing reports showing the pathing order as shown here:

Determining the order in which Success Events take place using page-level pathing can be very difficult since the same Success Event can take place on many different pages (i.e. Product Views) and many pages don’t have any Success Events.  Therefore, my concept is to provide Success Event Pathing which is a pathing report that only contains entries representing your website’s define Success Events so you can see, at a 20,000 foot level, how visitors perform these actions.  Make sense?

Implementing Success Event Pathing
So how do you implement this idea?  Well the first step is to make sure you have properly tagged all of your site Success Events.  Once this is done, you have to pass the name of the Success Event to a Traffic Variable (sProp) on the page in which it occurs.  There are a few ways to do this:

• Use JavaScript to look for a Success Event being set and pass a predefined name to the new custom sProp at that time
• Use a VISTA rule to set the custom sProp value when each Success Event takes place

Regardless of how you set it, the ultimate goal is to simply add a value (name) to the custom sProp for each Success Event that makes sense to you and your users when the Success Event takes place.  Once completed, speak to your Account Manager or ClientCare and have pathing enabled for that sProp and you will be able to see reports like the one above.  As is always the case with pathing, keep in mind that the reports are for Visits only (not across multiple visits).  If you need to see this information across visits, please speak to your Account Manager who can put you in touch with our advanced solutions team.  Finally, if the same Success Event takes place on more than one page and you have a need to differentiate between them, you could concatenate the pagename and the Success Event into the sProp (or a second sProp).

That’s it.  Useful?  Worthless?  Please let me know what you think?

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

The customer then goes on to say that every time they open up an eVar report, they always see metrics that mean nothing to them or the dreaded “No Data Match This Criteria…” message which scares their users into thinking all of their data has disappeared!  In this post, I will show you a trick to make sure the metrics you want will show up every time you open up your eVar reports (and it is not Default Metrics so keep reading!)

Default Behavior
By default, when you open an eVar report, SiteCatalyst shows the metrics selected in the “Default Metrics” area of the Admin Console.  In this post, I showed how you can change these “Default Metrics.”  However, even knowing how to set these default metrics will not always help you since those metrics are chosen for all eVar reports and often times you want to have different metrics by default for different eVar reports.  It is also important to understand that once you change metrics in any report using the “Add Metrics” button, those newly selected metrics will override the default metrics for that SiteCatalyst session.  Finally, for those that see the “No Data Match This Criteria…” message, keep in mind that this is SiteCatalyst’s way of telling you that the metrics currently added to the eVar report have no data.  Changing the metrics to ones that do have data will resolve this issue.  For bonus points, keep in mind that if there is data for the selected metrics, but no associated eVar values, you will see the “None” row instead of the message above.

Report Customization Trick
So understanding the preceding information, we can now move on to the trick to solve this riddle.  Our goal is to setup each eVar report with its own set of default metrics that will not be overridden by the default metrics or the metrics added to the preceding report.  As is usually the case, those who have kept up with this blog have already been educated on the tools needed to solve this riddle, but may not know how to combine them to accomplish this goal.  The two tools needed are Custom Reports and the Menu Customizer.  Here are the steps to customize metrics in Conversion reports:

1. Open a Conversion (eVar) report
2. Add/Remove the metrics that you would like all of your users to see when they open this eVar report (note that you can add more than the three normally allowed!)
3. Make any other setting changes you would like to the report (i.e. graph type)
4. Save the report as a Custom Report using the icon in the toolbar (see below) being sure to name the report as you would like it to appear in your menu structure (you can make it similar to the default eVar report name if you’d like)
5. Open the Admin Console and select the appropriate report suite(s) and navigate to the Menu Customization area
6. Hide visibility of the current eVar report in the menu structure
7. Drag the newly created custom report (found in the Custom Reports folder) to the eVar report area and next to the newly hidden eVar report and save the changes
8. Repeat steps 1-7 for any other eVar reports for which you’d like to customize the metrics

Traffic Reports
While most of the questions I have received are related to Conversion reports, you can follow the same process to customize which metrics appear in Traffic reports.  Keep in mind that traffic reports generally have fewer metrics to work with, but the process is identical.

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

What Are Instances?
So what are instances?  Instances is SiteCatalyst’s way of telling you how many times a Conversion Variable has received a value.  Doesn’t sound too hard does it (just wait…)?  So before we dig deeper, let’s start by coming face-to-face with the Instances metric.  To do this, open any eVar report you have in your report suite.  Once you have opened the report, click the “Add Metrics” link and you will see a metric named Instances in the list.  You can add this metric to the report by itself or alongside other Success Event metrics.  Below, I have added the Instances metric to a report showing Blog Post Views for the Blog Post Title eVar.  In this case, the Instances metric matches the Blog Post Views metric because that Success Event is set every time, but there will often be cases where an eVar will have Instances (have a value set), but no Success Event takes place:

So what does this report tell you?  It is basically saying that, in this example, the value of “Plug-ins [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]” was passed to this eVar 217 times.  Not all SiteCatalyst users utilize the Instances metric in eVar reports, but there are times when the Instances metric magically transforms into other metrics that are useful which I will describe next.

Instances = Searches
When using SiteCatalyst Search Engine and Search Keyword reports, you may have used the “Searches” metric to see how many searches your site generated from each search engine and keyword.  The Searches metric in these reports is really the Instances metric with a different name.  It acts just like the Instances metric and can be added to reports as needed.  In fact, if you want to see a SiteCatalyst “magic trick,” you can open a report like the one shown above for a custom eVar and then click to a Search Engine or Keyword report and you can see the Instances column name magically change from Instances to Searches (but don’t wait for applause since no one but you will find this terribly exciting!

Instances = Product Views
This same concept applies to Product Views when looking at the Products report.  When viewing a Products report, SiteCatalyst renames the Instances metric to “Product Views.”  I have seen many clients get confused when they see a new Success Event named Product Views that they don’t recall setting!

Instances = Click-Throughs
Finally, the same concept applies to Click-throughs in the Campaign reports.  Click-throughs is the Instances metric in the Tracking Code report and all related campaign Classification reports.

So What?
So why am I telling you all of this?  Unfortunately, there are times when the Instances metric can cause problems.  The following are some problems I have encountered and how you can avoid them.

Instances, as a metric, is not the same as a true custom or pre-defined Success Event (such as Orders or Cart Additions).  True Success Event reports have eVar values tied to them when the Success Event is set, but Instances does not.  For this reason, as you get more advanced in SiteCatalyst, you may choose to set custom success events instead of relying on the Instances metric.  For example, a long time ago, I was trying to create an eVar Subrelation report for a client so I could see credit card product views broken down by City and Age, only to find out that it wouldn’t work since I was using the Instances metric.  After thinking about it for a while, it made sense since SiteCatalyst had Instances for City and for Age, but did not have a table defining the intersection of City and Age for Product Views.  To create the report that I was looking for, I needed a custom Success Event for Product Views that I set when a visitor viewed a Product Page.  Once this was in place, SiteCatalyst would assign the Age and City to that custom success event and I could create subrelation reports to my heart’s content.

Another “gotcha” is that Instances metrics can wreak havoc on Calculated Metrics.  This is due to the fact that Instances are tied to the specific report you are looking at.  At some point, you may have created a Calculated Metric and see a metric in the list that says “Visits (Report-Specific)” and wondered what that meant.  Using what we have learned here, you can see that what this is really saying is that if you are in the Products report and you want to create a Calculated Metric that divides Registrations by Product Views (where you are using the Instances version of the Product Views metric), you can do this, but when you open that Calculated Metric in a Search Engine report, it will really be dividing Registrations by Searches (the Instances metric of that report).  In effect, the denominator in this formula will change based upon the report in which you are viewing the Calculated Metric.  If you were to add the same Calculated Metric to the City eVar report, you would be viewing Registrations divided by the Instances of each eVar value (Chicago, New York, etc…) in that particular eVar report (I told you Instances can get confusing!).

Let’s clarify this through an example.  Let’s say you are looking at the Natural Search Keyword report and viewing Searches and Blog Post Views as shown here:

So in this case, the natural keyword “omniture” drove people to the site 60 times and resulted in 12 Blog Post Views.  So now let’s say that we want to create a calculated metric that divides Searches by Blog Post Views.  Unfortunately, as shown below, when we attempt to create the calculated metric, you will not see a “Searches” metric in the list since it is really the Instances metric for that report:

However, since we see the “Report-Specific” in parentheses, we know that the numerator will change depending upon what report you are in.  Finally, if viewed outside of an eVar report (as a general calculated metric), the metric will default to Visits.

For both of the reasons above, just to be safe, I tend to set custom Success Event metrics for Instances metrics that I plan to use a lot such as Product Views and Campaign Click-throughs.

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

What Is Multi-Suite Tagging?
Multi-Suite Tagging is a fancy name for sending SiteCatalyst data to two or more report suites.  So when would you want/need to use multi-suite tagging?  I have seen Multi-Suite Tagging used most often in the following situations:

1. A company has a similar website in different geographic locations and wants to compare the same metrics for each region
2. A company has a similar website, but many different brands and wants to compare the same metrics for different brands
3. A company wants to provide a subset of data to one group.  For example, the customer service group can only see customer service page data, but other groups can see all website data

The value of Multi-Suite Tagging can best be seen through an example.  Let’s imagine that Greco Inc. is a holding company that has various retail brands under different names.  Both retail brands (let’s say Brand A & Brand B) provide similar products and most people don’t know that they are both owned by Greco Inc.  The CEO of Greco Inc. would like to see website data for each business separately, but also have a combined view so he can see performance across all of Greco Inc.

To accomplish this, each page on Brand A would send data to the “greco_brand_a” and “greco_global” report suites, while each page on Brand B would send its data to the “greco_brand_b” and “greco_global” report suites.  Therefore, each page on both sites is sending two image requests to Omniture - one for the Brand site and one to a Global site that consolidates all data.

So how is this done?  There are two different ways to implement Multi-Suite Tagging:

1. Modify the “s_account” value in your .js file to include more than one report suite ID
2. Utilize a VISTA rule to route data to additional report suites

Here is an example of item #1 above from Omniture’s Implementation Manual:

(NOTE: The data collection subdomain, shown above as ‘suite1,’ is populated using the s.visitorNamespace variable, and is typically not specific to individual report suites. The example above is provided for the purpose of illustrating the comma-separated list of report suite IDs in the image request URL, and is not meant to suggest that your data collection domain should be changed when using multi-suite tagging. In the vast majority of cases, you should not change the s.visitorNamespace variable when implementing multi-suite tagging.)

Regardless of the method used, the result is that all data collected on a page is sent to more than one data set within SiteCatalyst.

Using Multi-Suite Tagging
So building upon the previous scenario, we can now see how Greco Inc. can take advantage of Multi-Suite Tagging.  Let’s say that the Greco Inc. CEO’s first priority is to see Revenue by Marketing Channel.  Since there are two separate report suites involved, it is now possible to use the “Compare to Site” feature within most SiteCatalyst reports to run the same report showing two different data sets.  In this case, Greco Inc. would open the Brand A report suite, navigate to the Marketing Channel report (a SAINT classification of Campaigns) and then add Revenue as the desired metric.  This will display all Brand A Revenue broken down by Marketing Channel.  From there, all that is needed is to select the “Configure Report” option and then select “Compare to Site” and select the Brand B report suite.  The result is a report that looks like this:

Of course, it is possible (and often necessary) to add the normalization option when metrics are different between report suites.

But wait…there’s more!  Since Greco Inc. has decided to create a Global report suite, all visitors to either the Brand A or Brand B website have the same SiteCatalyst “Visitor ID” in the Global report suite.  This means that as far as the global report suite is concerned, Omniture SiteCatalyst considers Brand A and Brand B to be one massive website with different URL’s.  This is important because it enables you to do the following:

1. See paths that visitors took from the Brand A site to the Brand B site (and vice-versa).  This allows you to see if the same person is visiting both of your brands which can be interesting information (especially if you foster “co-opetition”)
2. Get a de-duplicated count of unique visitors among all of the sites that you own.  For example, let’s say that Brand A has 20,000 monthly unique visitors and Brand B has 15,000 monthly unique visitors (for a total of 35,000 monthly unique visitors).  That sounds great, but if you look in the Global report suite, you might see that you only truly have 30,000 monthly unique visitors if the same visitor went to both sites (5,000 such visitors in this example).
3. Create Segments using criteria from multiple websites (i.e. Show me visitors who looked at a product on Brand A’s site and brought something on Brand B’s site)
4. Utilize Participation to see what pages on Brand A’s site lead to success on Brand B’s site (and vice-versa)
5. Utilize Campaign Tracking at a higher level to see what marketing campaigns led to success across multiple sites

With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility…
The preceding example underscores one of the most important things to consider when using Multi-Suite Tagging:

It is critical that most or all SiteCatalyst variables be consistent amongst any report suites that are Multi-Suite Tagged

In the example above, it is somewhat easy since Revenue is always set in the same manner in SiteCatalyst.  But imagine that one of the items the Greco Inc. CEO wanted to see was Website Registrations.  If Brand A’s website stored this in Success Event #1 and Brand B’s website stored Registrations in Success Event #4, it would be impossible to compare the two from within SiteCatalyst (you would have to use the ExcelClient instead).

The situation gets even worse when you consider the Global report suite.  If you recall, we mentioned that data for both Brand A and Brand B was combined in a Global report suite.  Now imagine that Brand A is counting Website Registrations in Success Event #1, but Brand B is counting E-mail Subscriptions in Success Event #1.  Now the Global report suite has two different metrics being combined (Brand A Website Registrations + Brand B E-mail Subscriptions) into the same metric.  That renders Success Event #1 useless in the Global report suite and defeats its entire intention!  In fact, I have often had to be the bearer of bad news to clients who have made business decisions based upon a Global report suite metric, only to have me show them that the numbers they were looking at all along were incorrect.

Therefore, using Multi-Suite Tagging, while extremely powerful, requires advanced forethought about your set-up and coordination between different brands and/or geographic locations.  If you are interested in avoiding common mistakes, I strongly recommend you contact Omniture Consulting and consider their Corporate Governance consulting project which is designed to help clients avoid the common pitfalls of large, multi-site implementations.

Important Things To Know About Multi-Suite Tagging
The following are some important things to know about Multi-Suite Tagging:

1. Since Omniture is storing additional data for you through Multi-Suite Tagging, you have to pay for the additional server calls (though Omniture charges a reduced rate for these)
2. Omniture also provides something called a Global Rollup Suite that aggregates data from multiple individual report suites.  These are more cost-effective than Multi-Suite Tagging, but do not provide inter-site pathing, de-duplicated unique visitors, Traffic Data Correlations, DataWarehouse, etc…
3. It is not possible to create a Multi-Suite Tagged Global report suite using historical data so it is best to plan for this ahead of time or pick a date at which you plan to coordinate your sites and launch the Global suite.

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

Report Suite Segments
A while back, I wrote a post on how to create visitor Segments for use in DataWarehouse and ASI. Creating these segments can be tricky at times and often requires a lot of testing.  Wouldn’t it be great if someone at your organization who is well versed in creating SiteCatalyst Segments could create a bunch of them and share them with everyone else?  Well you can, but may not know about it!  In the Admin Console, there is a place where an Admin can add as many Segments as they would like and all other users can then take advantage of them.  As shown here, I have created two basic Visit-based segments which can now be seen by anyone using that report suite (note that you cannot share Segments across report suites!):

Once this is done, when other users of that report suite use DataWarehouse or ASI, they would see the following:

As you can see, the two Segments the administrator created appear in the list, but are “locked” for everyone else.  Obviously, users can create as many of their own segments as they want, but using these global segments can go a long way to ensuring “apples to apples” reporting.

Default Metrics
Do you ever get annoyed that every time you create a new conversion report, SiteCatalyst always defaults to certain metrics (i.e. Revenue or Orders)?  Maybe your site doesn’t even sell anything!  Did you know that you can choose which metrics show up in reports by default?  For example, in my case, the metrics I use the most often are Blog Post Views, Visits and Blog Posts.  Why not have each new conversion report I open default to these instead of what SiteCatalyst wants to show me?  To do this, you have your Administrator set the report suite default metrics in the admin console (again, these are on a report suite by report suite basis):

Keep in mind that once you start working with reports in a session and alter the metrics, those metrics will be used until you logout and will not revert back to the default metrics.

Quick Tip: If you want to set different metrics for each Conversion Report instead of using the same three above, simply:

1. Open the Conversion Report
2. Add/remove metrics as needed
3. Same as a Custom Report
4. Move the new Custom Report to the appropriate place in the menu using the Menu Customizer
5. Hide the original version of the Conversion Report  using the Menu Customizer

Track Key Visitors
If you have ever dreamed of being a “private eye” you will like the Key Visitors feature.  In reality, it is not terribly exciting, but it can be fun.  The idea behind Key Visitors is that you can specify up to five domains or IP addresses from which you are receiving traffic and see traffic form these in separate reports.  Usually, clients use these to track competitors as shown here:

Once you have enabled these, you can see Page Views by these Key Visitors (found under the Visitor Profile >> Visitor Details area of the left navigation) and what pages on your site they have viewed:

Using this, we can see that some WebTrends folks have taken a keen interest in some of our blog posts ;-).  Please note that these reports do not count traffic referred from these domains, but rather traffic that originated from the domains.  In other words, the report above is showing traffic where the visitor’s ISP was registered as webtrends.com, not traffic sent to blogs.omniture.com from webtrends.com (though if they wanted to send us traffic they could!).

Paid Search Detection
I can’t tell you how many times I have had an irate client call me and tell me that they are not seeing any data in their Paid Search Keywords or Paid Search Engines reports.  They tell me that they have added tracking codes and query string parameters, but the reports are not showing any data - SiteCatalyst must be broken!  I then proceed to ask them if they have enabled Paid Search Detection in the Admin Console so that SiteCatalyst knows which query string identifiers it should treat as Paid Search and which ones it should not.  That is usually when I hear a long pause…  Hopefully this has not happened to you, but just to be sure, please verify that your Administrator has this set-up correctly (this can be applied to multiple report suites at one time).  It looks like this:

Once this is set-up, all search engine traffic will be split out into Natural and Paid reports instead of being lumped together into the “All” reports found in the Traffic Sources area.

Finding Methods Allocation
Many of my clients that use the Finding Methods reports (i.e. Referring Domains) do not think about how those reports use Allocation.  In the Conversion Variable post, I explained the different eVar allocations, but there are special allocations associated with the Finding Methods reports.  These reports normally “expire” values at the end of the Visit and only have “First Value” and “Linear” as allocation options.  However, you can modify these expirations such that these reports expire when a Success Event takes place if that Success Event takes place prior to the Visit ending (since the longest these reports will expire is a Visit).  You can see the various options here:

Internal URL Filters
Often times, you have multiple domains that are part of your entire website infrastructure.  For example, your website might be www.abc.com but you also have a marketing “micro-site” with the domain www.abc-rocks.com.  In this case, SiteCatalyst would not know that the latter is owned by your organization and it might treat referrals from www.abc-rocks.com to www.abc.com as if they were coming from a random Internet site.  While there may be some cases where that is what you want, it is more likely that you would like to treat www.abc-rocks.com as though it is no different than www.abc.com.  To accomplish this, SiteCatalyst provides an Internal URL Filters area in the admin console.  On this page, you can specify which domains you want to treat as part of your site and which are truly external to your site.  In this case, you would add the following:

Therefore, if you ever look at your referring domains report and notice domains that your company owns, tell your Administrator that they need to add them to the list above and they will not appear in the referring domains reports again.

Classification Hierarchies
For those of you who have mastered SAINT Classifications, Classification Hierarchies offer a way to take things to the next level.  Often times there are relationships between the various items that you set-up as Classifications and Classification Hierarchies allow you to “nest” classifications so you can build reports that breakdown the item being classified into logical buckets.  For example, let’s say that you sell electronics and have many different types of Products.  You have already classified Products into Product Group, Product SubGroup and Manufacturer.  These classifications allow you to slice and dice all of your Product data by any of these elements separately, but what if you wanted to see Product metrics by Product Group, then for each Product Group broken down by SubGroup, etc…?  To do this you would use the Classification Hierarchies area of the Admin Console and drag over all of the classifications you want nested as shown here:

As shown above, you can choose from any classifications that have been set-up for the Products variable.  Once you have done this, you save it and when you look at the Products report area you will see a special icon indicating that a Classification Hierarchy exists and will have the ability to drill down by all of the items you have added to the hierarchy:

In this view, we can see Products broken down by Product Group, Product SubGroup and Manufacturer and the Revenue and Orders for each.  Clicking on “Apple” or “Sony” would take us to the lowest level, which in this case is Products.  You can create multiple classification hierarchies for the same variable and you can create classification hierarchies for any Conversion variable that has classifications.

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

Tracking Blog Post Views
When I started this blog, naturally, the first thing I wanted to know was how many views each blog post received.  While I could do this by looking at the page views that each page name received, I decided to take it a step further by defining a Blog Post View as a Success Event.  This would allow me to see a pretty chart of Blog Post Views over time and set Alerts if I had the need.  Setting this one Success Event allowed me to see the following graph:

However, this metric only indicates total Blog Post Views.  It does not tell me which blog posts or even which blog itself contributes to these numbers so, by itself, it only provides part of the picture.  Therefore, the next step was to add some Conversion Variables (eVars) to allow me to break down these Blog Post Views by Blog Name, Blog Author, etc…  To do this, I had developers capture the following items in eVars each time a Blog Post was read (see SiteCatalyst Debugger below):

• Blog Name (eVar11)
• Blog Author (eVar13)
• Blog Post Title (eVar9)
• Blog Topic Area (eVar10)
• Time of Day (eVar5), Day of Week (eVar6), Weekday/Weekend (eVar7)

Once this was done, I could slice and dice the Blog Post Views metric to see the following reports:

Using Search Filters
Another thing I did to make my life easier was to make sure that all of my blog posts had the phrase “[Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]” in the title.  This allowed me to create a search filter (see below) that only shows my blog posts in the Blog Post Title report.  After I ran the search filter, I added the resulting filtered report to a blog dashboard and could be assured that all of my [properly named] posts would appear there after being launched.

Watching Trends
Another thing I wanted to see was what kind of an impact my blog was having over time.  To see this, I created a 7-day moving average graph that plotted the trend of my blog.  In the first graph below, you can see the raw number of Blog Post Views my blog received and in the second graph you can see the percentage of all Omniture blog post views for which my blog accounted.  The moving average feature (found under trended link) allowed me to filter out some of the day-to-day “noise” and weekends to get a clearer picture on how my blog readership was progressing.  I also added calendar events to provide the reader with some context related to traffic spikes.

Counter eVar
One more thing you may have noticed in the Debugger report above is the use of the Counter eVar (see eVar12).  As described in the past, a Counter eVar is a way to increase a counter for a particular user and to tie their current counter value (i.e. score) to a Success Event.  In this case, I set a Counter eVar every time a user views a Blog Post.  Therefore, if you had read three Omniture Blog Posts before reading this post, then the value in your cookie would now be four.  This means that in my reports it would show one Blog Post View where the user had read four Blog Posts.  This helps me determine if the people reading my posts are first-timers or regular readers.  Keep in mind, however, that these numbers will always be skewed towards 1st time visitors due to different computer usage and cookie deletion, but they are still useful to see trends.  Below you can see how orange, green, red and purple bars are slowing growing over time, indicating that I am beginning to get some repeat readers (yea!).

However, in order to see a higher-level view of these trends, I use SAINT Classifications to aggregate the Counter eVar values into more meaningful buckets (i.e. Two-Three Blog Posts Views, Six-Ten Blog Post Views, etc…) and create a report like this:

Blog Pathing
Finally, since we have the name of each blog being passed to an eVar already, why not pass the blog name to a Traffic Variable (sProp) as well?  This will allow us to enable Pathing, which makes it easy to see how often visitors are going from one Omniture blog to another.  For example, in the report below, you can see how often readers of my blog are visiting the blogs of my co-workers.

As you can see, only 13% of my blog readers are taking the time to visit other Omniture blogs.  It looks like we have some work to do on cross-promotion or perhaps we need a re-design of our blog interface to encourage visitors to read more than one blog.  This report can be used as a “before/after” for any design changes we make down the road to see if the new design improves blog “cross-sell.”

Wish List Items
Believe it or not, you aren’t the only ones who have to wait for developers!  Below is a list of items I have on my wish list:

1. Track the “tags” associated with each post using the Products Variable (which allows for multiple values)
2. Track Comments Submitted as a Success Event
3. Determine how often people are reading my blog posts off the Omniture website (i.e. RSS Reader, LinkedIn, etc…)

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

Why Pathing Is Not Enough
When you first start out using SiteCatalyst, it seems like there is nothing you can’t accomplish with page-by-page pathing.  For example, let’s say you have a conversion process that includes the following steps:

1. Get Customer Information
2. Get Shipping Information
3. Get Billing Information
4. Show Order Thank You Page

Since each of these pages will have a unique page name, there is no reason why you can’t create a pathing fall-out report that includes these pages so you can see customer fall-out.  It might look something like this:

You can monitor this over time and even add multiple versions of this report to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard so you can compare different time periods or countries.  However, pathing reports have one major downside, they include all site traffic.  What if you wanted to see the same fall-out report above for visitors coming from Google Campaigns or only for first time visitors?  To do this, you have a few options:

1. Use Omniture Discover and apply the segment you desire to the fall-out report
2. Create ASI slots for the segments you desire and create the fall-out report in the ASI slots
3. Create a DataWarehouse report and calculate the fall-out using a spreadsheet
4. Merge together segment and page data into a new Traffic Variable (sProp) and enable pathing (advanced)

While all of these will work, there is a much easier way - utilize the SiteCatalyst Conversion Funnel report.

Conversion Funnel
So what is the Conversion Funnel?  You would be amazed how many long-time SiteCatalyst users have never found or used this report.  At its core, the Conversion Funnel report is a special report that allows you to add Success Events to a funnel and see high-level fall-out numbers between each metric.  While it sounds like a pathing fall-out report, it is actually very different.  In a pathing report, in order for a path view to the second page in the flow to be counted, the page view has to take place after the first page the fall-out report and within the same visit.  Conversely, a Conversion Funnel report does not care about visits and only reports raw metrics (Success Events) that take place during the specified reporting time period and calculates the difference between every two metrics.  For example, in the following Conversion Funnel report, if the time frame is February 2009, then the report would be indicating that, in February, the Customer Information success event took place 328,998 times, the Billing Information success event took place 126,559 times and there were 57,800 Orders (I kept the numbers similar to the pathing numbers above for simplicity, but in reality these might not match exactly).  This doesn’t mean that the same visitors performed each of these Success Events in the same session, it just shows how many of these Success Events took place in the specified time frame.

To get to a Conversion Funnel report, you simply navigate to a set of metrics, Purchase Metrics (shown below), Shopping Cart Metrics or Custom Metrics and click on the item that contains Conversion Funnel:

The truth is that it doesn’t really matter which “Conversion Funnel” link you click on since you can add/remove metrics as you wish, but the report will default to different success event metrics depending upon which version you select.

Now that we are beginning to understand what Conversion Funnels are, why should we care?  The magic of Conversion Funnels lies in the ability to filter them by Conversion Variables (eVars).  As mentioned above, it can be a bit challenging to view fall-out reports by Campaign, Visit Number, City, Marketing Channel, etc… but Conversion Funnels come with a built-in ability to filter by any available eVar:

Filtering is simply a way for you to tell SiteCatalyst to show you a different view of the Conversion Funnel that only shows metric counts where the selected eVar contained the specified value at the time the success event was set.  The best part of this feature is that you can apply a filter and the bookmark the report or add it to a dashboard and compare Conversion Funnels side-by-side.  For example, you can filter a Conversion Funnel by Marketing Channel and see a Paid Search Conversion Funnel next to a Display Ad Conversion Funnel in a dashboard.  Finally, Conversion Funnel reports also provide a slew of conversion metrics at the bottom of the report which can also be added to dashboards.

Important Things To Know About Conversion Funnels
The following are some important things to know about Conversion Funnels:

1. You can use the Compare to Site feature to see two different report suite Conversion Funnels side-by-side or two different date ranges side-by-side
2. Calculated Metrics cannot be added to Conversion Funnel reports
3. Conversion Variable (eVar) filtering will only apply if the Conversion Variable (eVar) is set before or at the same time as the success events in the funnel

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.